Victor Oladejo Wins N100k For The #AprilEssayCompetition

Cmoni
3 min readMay 1, 2024

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.~ Winston Churchill

Following another interesting peer review session on 28/04/2024, Victor Oladejo emerged as the winner of our #AprilEssayCompetition with 8 nominations.

Below is a breakdown of the nominations sent in by 10 writers.

  1. THE DANGERS OF SKIN BLEACHING by Ebube Ezeadum received 2 nominations from Chukwuemeka and Emmanuel
  2. A Growing Skin Bleaching Narrative by Chukwuemeka Oluka had 5 nominations from Oluwaseun, Daniel, Becky, Peace and Victor.
  3. Meeting fate & When Red chooses to be Blue by Emmanuel Enaku both received 1 nomination each from Solomon and Ebube respectively.

5. Ward Round by Daniel Ogba received 3 nominations from Becky, Victor and Chukwuemeka.

6. The GIFT had 7 nominations from Oluwaseun, Daniel, Peace, Emmanuel, Solomon, Ebube and Esther while Bleaching Fever also has 1 nomination from Esther.

The rest of the essays were equally good and I particularly enjoyed HEAT WAVES IN NIGERIA, CAUSES, EFFECTS AND CORRECTIVE MEASURES by Oluwaseun Osanyiro because she’s more of a creative writer. As Chukwuemeka said during the session, it’s always inspiring to see writers foray outside their forte to other genres.

FEEDBACK

Now I understand that it takes time to read all the stories and assess them objectively. But this is what we are here to do. The open peer review we practice facilitates wider contribution, reduces the possibility of bias and engenders transparency around the pain points of our noble craft.
So the writers who don’t read or just browse through the stories are unserious and will learn little.

We had great feedback during the peer review session. Noteworthy speakers include Daniel, who harped on the importance of structure and Freytag’s pyramid. Emmanuel read out a detailed and dynamic appraisal to show he read every story. Chukwuemeka, Becky, Victor and Oluwaseun also made incisive contributions.

Here are some excerpts from Chukwuemeka's review:

  1. ‘Dangers of Skin Bleaching’ By: Ebube Ezeadum

This work cuts through. A beautiful introductory story that launches the reader into the thick of things makes his work remarkable. It is a good representation of what an opinion article can be. Even though he could have done better with paragraphing, his streams of thought were still beautiful. He is a writer to watch out for.

(2) ‘Ward Round’ By: Daniel Ogba

This story was written with remarkable brevity. He satisfied the demands of the fiction writing prompt. Another remarkable thing was that the story was written in the present (continuous) tense, a route quite unpopular while writing third-person narratives. Save for a few grammatical errors, his work was set apart as well.

Click here for his feedback/review on other entries.

You can watch the entire session on YouTube.

We are always grateful to the reading audience for their support and I thank all the participants for their valuable contributions.

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